A Visionary Platform of Architecture

“[un]finished”

4th Year Student of Universidade do Sul de Santa Catarina (Brazil) – Bachelor in Architecture. Also an intern on landscaping and architecture firm JA8.

Project

Designed to shelter student activity in multiple campi across Brazil, this project embraces the idea of incompletion – a blank space of sorts to be filled by the students themselves.

As in academic life, a simple structure is presentend, leaving it to the students themselves to shape and play with their environment.

The grid framing of the landscape turns the surroundings into an integral part of the architecture, making each implementation unique. In the drawings, however, the landscape is abstracted in an effort to give space for the viewer to imagine his own implementation while still providing some guidance.

Through the use of curtains, a new visual relationship is established, allowing the students to experiment with different possibilities of space organization and atmospheres. Where solid walls could give “too much” privacy, the translucency inspires self-policing and integration.

Interview

Who influences you graphically?

I try to keep a multidisciplinary approach to representing architecture. From cinematic photography, to great painters such as Tarsila do Amaral and Edward Hopper, or from traditional Japanese illustrations to last century’s Brazilian album covers, I believe any form of visual or poetic expression I come across can be very enriching.

Inside the architectural field, the usual suspects, such as Van der Rohe, Superstudio and Fala Atelier, were real eye-openers.

You talk about leaving the landscape abstract to allow space for the viewers imagination, is this an approach you explore through all your representations?

Definitely. I like working with collages and illustrations because they do not feed a ready vision of reality that can be instantly consumed. To spatially comprehend these spaces, the reader has to go through a much more engaging and intimate process of imagining that place in their head – and no two people will imagine it the same.

In this case, as important as the landscape was, being specific would only limit this capability of making it a more personal experience. When I approach each project, however, I like to ponder on what has to be clear and what could be abstracted so these relationships can take place.

What defined the colour palette?

It is mainly the result of experimenting with Wes Anderson’ish pastel colours and tropical imagery.

Impermanent elements become bright and colourful while the idea of a “blank” space is present in the neutral tones of the pavilion.

On the background, our national colours, green and yellow, symbolically represent the replicability of the pavilion across Brazil.

What was your process in terms of concept development in relation to the production of images?

I first wrote down what I felt was a solid basis for the concept, then proceeded to work on a rougher version of the main corridor image to iterate and experiment with texture, scale and composition.

These images were not a final step in the project, but an early and foremost part of the process of conceiving the architecture. As they evolved, some new concepts erupted and some grew stronger.

To what extent did the cultural context of Brazil influence the method of representation?

I think of Brazilian culture as somewhat of a collage itself. One of our biggest cultural manifestations, the “Anthropophagic Movement”, was essentially about how we can digest foreign cultural and regurgitate something new and essentially Brazilian.

This notion of critical openness to foreign and domestic influences is definitely present in my work, both broadly as a concept and specificaly with the reappropriation of imagery.

Lastly, I try to keep an optimistic, maybe even romaticized, vision of our country and culture, heavily influenced by the works of Tropicália’s poets Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, in which I feel is right at home in this type of cheerful and unpretentious illustration.

About

André is an architecture student currently living in Florianópolis, Brazil.